HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs IBM XIV comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM are both solutions in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.5, while IBM is ranked #10. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 10.2% mindshare in MS, compared to IBM’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of IBM users who would recommend it.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Read 303 HPE 3PAR StoreServ reviews

6,769 Views
1,286 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM XIV

Read 6 IBM XIV reviews

338 Views
335 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

IBM XIV

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

IBM XIV and HPE 3PAR StoreServ are competing products in enterprise storage solutions. HPE 3PAR StoreServ tends to have the upper hand with its advanced features, although IBM XIV is notable for its cost-effectiveness.

Features: IBM XIV offers easy scalability, robust data protection, and predictable latency which makes it suitable for dynamic environments. HPE 3PAR StoreServ provides advanced virtualization, efficient data storage optimization, and tiered storage to enhance performance and utility. Additionally, its intuitive management and robust architecture support complex enterprise needs.

Room for Improvement: IBM XIV could enhance its initial setup process and expand its feature set to include more advanced data handling options. Improvements in licensing flexibility could also make it more attractive. HPE 3PAR StoreServ, on the other hand, could work on reducing its higher upfront costs. Enhancing user simplicity and optimizing support responsiveness could also benefit users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE 3PAR StoreServ offers a streamlined deployment process with proactive customer support, which aids in smoother organizational transitions. In contrast, IBM XIV provides straightforward setup steps but often requires more initial effort. The proactive service model of HPE gives it an edge in deployment efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: IBM XIV is attractive for budget-conscious enterprises with its lower setup costs and favorable ROI due to economical scaling. HPE 3PAR StoreServ, although requiring higher initial investment, offers long-term value from advanced features and data efficiency that justify its cost. The principal financial distinction is HPE's higher initial expenditure offset by potential operational ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. IBM XIV Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. IBM XIV

February 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

303

Ranking in other categories

NAS (10th), All-Flash Storage (14th)

IBM XIV

Ranking in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) category, the mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 10.2%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM XIV is 3.1%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ	10.2%
IBM XIV	3.1%
Other	86.7%

Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

Featured Reviews

Cyril Omatsola

Information Systems & Security Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

Ease of use in data center boosts resilience and infrastructure efficiency

I find the HPE 3PAR StoreServ valuable for its ease of use and resilience, which is beneficial. The main benefits I have seen from having HPE 3PAR StoreServ include its use at a small branch I managed for about three years with around 60 users. It operates effectively because it is an HPE product we use there. I have not experienced any significant issues besides occasional IT-related ones, such as local database problems. Since handing over the administration of the system to someone else and moving to another department, there have not been any issues. There are many features that exist but I haven't needed to try. Before moving out of that role in my organization, I knew it was a product I enjoyed working with for infrastructure purposes. After completing my new role, I intend to return to infrastructure.

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Ajith Kandaramage

IT Operation Engineer at HNB

Good value for money but issues with modular scaling

IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness I've been using IBM XIV for two and a half years. IBM XIV is stable. IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I like that it's stable. This is the reason why we're using these products. We work in the broadcast market, and stability is very important. HPE has global services, and that's also important. Dell and HPE are some big companies, and their solutions are robust and stable."

"The support is really fast. There is very good support for 3PAR storage."

"I have a lot of applications that need higher IOPS, and 3PAR achieves this operation normally without any issues for the management."

"Technical support for both 3PAR and Dell EMC in my country, Iran, is very difficult because we are under sanctions."

"Being able to provision drives on demand, as opposed to populating a whole stack of drives and not using them. In the latter scenario, you are locking your money in, you don't get a return on investment. On the fly, you can build up your storage as needed, so that's a very good feature."

"Valuable features include the intuitiveness of the SAN itself, a lot of the built-in logic and functionality, the tiering that it uses to determine what type of disk is best for the various types of workloads, and the automation that is built in. It's also easy to manage."

"We do not have to take the whole system down to do upgrades."

"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is easy to use, fully featured and has a great graphical user interface."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

"IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness."

"Hands down, this is the easiest storage platform on the market to manage."

"Very easy to produce reporting data (Snaps). Very easy and fast for provisioning devices and Remote mirroring."

"Installation is amazingly easy."

"The performance and robustness of the systems are very good."

"As it spreads, a chuck of 1MB across the board means using all available spindles on the backend."

Cons

"Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have."

"We are seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard."

"We had a minor error when we were configuring this system, which initially detracted from its overall stability."

"The cloud-based monitoring Infosight would be better if users are automatically enrolled in the cloud/group based on the configuration or information gathered or uploaded on the internet."

"The solution could be improved in regard to space reclamation by adding automation."

"The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected."

"The availability of technical resources within HPE is becoming a challenge due to availability."

"Upgrades could be improved. We would like to see more upgrades."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ cons

"IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger requirements."

"This product was not a good fit for our organization as we have a ton of latency sensitive applications and XIV was not able to keep up with IO + latency demand."

"I encountered stability (performance) issues during enclosure or disk rebuild. Also some power supply issues due to malfunctions of circuits. Sometimes "internal" Snap sessions hang and consume pool capacity."

"The change form synchronous mirroring to asynchronous (and vice versa) without reconfiguration from scratch would be helpful."

"I would rather have a web GUI served directly from the unit, and a CLI accessible directly through SSH."

"Until the drive is replaced, the pool_resizing is locked."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It makes for less administrative overhead."

"It is a bit more expensive. IBM is cheaper than HPE in Turkey."

"You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown."

"Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries."

"It is reasonable. As compared to other solutions, it doesn't seem to be much different."

"It's a good price."

"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."

"To be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

"Licensing is straightforward."

"We have a five-year total cost of ownership where we pay an initial amount and then annually for maintenance."

"If you are going to use the product behind an SVC, IBM will price the units lower, since you are likely not to use any of the advanced copy services."

"No-license-required policy, unlike others where you need a license for everything. Just pay once and forget about licenses."

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Marketing Services Firm

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	72
Midsize Enterprise	74
Large Enterprise	170

No data available

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspective, it is reliable, easy to set up, stable, and offers quality block storage. All...

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What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very good.

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Comparisons

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 14% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 12% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ Competitors

IBM FlashSystem vs IBM XIV

Compared 25% of the time

XIO Hyper ISE vs IBM XIV

Compared 23% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs IBM XIV

Compared 20% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs IBM XIV

Compared 14% of the time

More IBM XIV Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

January 2026

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

Buyer's Guide

Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)

January 2026

Download IBM XIV product report

Also Known As

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

XIV

Overview

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment. The solution is very easy to use. The product is very robust and offers very good performance.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

IBM XIV is a high-end, grid-scale storage system that excels in tuning-free consistent performance, ease of use and exceptional data economics, including inline, and IBM Real-time Compression. IBM XIV is ideal for hybrid cloud, offering predictable service levels for dynamic workloads, simplified scale management, including in multi-tenant environments, flexible consumption models — and robust cloud automation and orchestration through OpenStack, RESTful API and VMware. It offers security and data protection through hot encryption, advanced mirroring and self-healing and investment protection with perpetual licensing.

IBM

Sample Customers

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Celero, NaviSite, Technische Universit_t Mªnchen, Netflix Inc., Muhr und Bender KG, Pelephone Communications

Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. IBM XIV

February 2026

Free Report: HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs. IBM XIV

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